“Thing is, you ain’t that thing no more. What you used to was.”
True Detective season 2 ended up being so bad that it makes me doubt whether or not the first season was actually as amazing as it was or if it was just carried on the backs of Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey. That isn't to say that the only problem is the casting choices - it might be a step down from those two in a way, but Rachel McAdams is always great, Taylor Kitsch fills his role fine, and Colin Farrell pulls a good performance almost entirely out of his ass. Farrell's Velcoro is a nothing, some terrible approximation of cop character tropes that would have sunk horribly without a skilled actor there to keep it afloat, which is pretty interesting considering he is acting across from Vince Vaughn so often. I say it is interesting not because they have chemistry - they don't - but because Vince Vaughn is also given a terrible character that has to say idiotic things every ten minutes, except the difference is that his performance faceplants like a drunk gymnast. Nic Pizzolatto writes dialog like he has never heard a single human being speak.
None of this is helped by the story either. True Detective season 2 is eight episodes of television with maybe three episodes of actual plot spread between them. Plot elements that feel like they should have taken longer are rushed into an episode or two while parts that should have been developed quickly end up lasting the entire season. Nobody involved in putting this season together seems to have any concept of how pacing should work. Almost nothing of import or interest is verified or revealed until the last three episodes, and in those three episodes those reveals come entirely in clinical spurts of expository dialog. The main characters end up feeling so removed from the story - and from each other - that they sound like robots reciting Wikipedia plot synopses when this happens. When it does all come together and all the characters finally end up intersecting, it is so unfulfilling that you feel like maybe you took a wrong turn on the remote and ended up in a different show. That is almost a compliment in a way though, as the times when season 2 least resembles True Detective and everybody just shuts up - the meth lab shoot out, the penultimate episode, the sudden change of focus in the finale - it almost works. Too bad those moments, few and far between as they are, continually become weighed down under the shambling misshapen beast that is the main narrative. Somehow, and I really have a hard time wrapping my head around this, this show has figured out a way to have very little plot and also be comically overcomplicated.
All of this could have been fine with the right choices in the tone of the show, but those choices were not made. It seems like Pizzolatto has completely and utterly misjudged what it was people enjoyed about the first season, and I don't just mean that because he jettisoned 99.9% of the interesting vague occult stuff. All of the great scenes of interpersonal character development have been replaced by shots of Los Angeles freeways. He saw everybody go wild about Rust Cohle and went "hey why not have an entire cast of fatalist mumblers this time, people will love it!" No Nic, nobody loves it. You wrote the television serial equivalent of a 40 year old dude in a Tapout shirt reading Camus and sniffing a jar of his own farts. The only positive of this season is now we have yet another creator who can be added to the ever growing list of "People Who Should Never Have Complete Creative Control Over Anything." Good job buddy, you will be super happy talking narrative development with George Lucas and Vince Russo at the next meeting.
WATCH if you, for some reason, think there aren't enough overly complicated and paper thin cop dramas about people with dark pasts. DON'T WATCH if you want the first season to remain unsullied.
I am incredibly grateful to Game of Thrones for this adventure I have found myself sucked into for some years now. I am grateful for all the emotions it brought me since day one, bitter and sweet alike. I am grateful for all the laughs, all the tears, all the jokes and gags, every single bit of it, I really am grateful and appreciative of it all. It's been just... wonderful.
That said, I am feeling robbed and betrayed right about now. This ending is arguably one of the worst series finales in the history of television and trust me I realize how bold of a statement that is. The terrible violations the characters have suffered this season, the lack of proper resolution to many of the plots and narratives developed over seasons worth of buildup, the seeking of shock value at the expense of quality writing... that and much much more solidified this as an absolute disappointment of a finale, as opposed to the marvel wrap it could've given this cultural phenomenon.
This episode does have its positives, as always the score, acting and cinematography are perfectly performed but I just do not think it's nearly enough to compensate for how lackluster the writing has been, as much as I wish they did. Oh well, sad as it may be, I'll just hold on to the good stuff and hope that GRRM's book, once finished, will tackle the ending in a more coherent, more respectful and more meaningful way. It's been real y'all...
P.S: I'll leave this here lest some people jump me again. This comment is a representation of my own personal opinion, I am entitled to one just as all of you are. If you enjoyed this season and felt this finale delivered what you were looking for then more power to you mate, but that doesn't nullify my opinion nor does it make yours any valid. If you want to discuss or challenge my views, I'd be more than happy to engage you on that basis but if all you have to offer are petty remarks then please keep them to yourself.
I didnt think it was a good choice to start right from the "end" but still i guess its no fairy tale.
I know this its a sad movie but still i cant help thinking a much better job coulve been done to make it more heartfelt.
THe acting was nothing lees than mediocre from both main characters, sometimes I felt that they were expressing emotions differently from what the context or speech implicates. The soundtrack its well picked but still its nothing out of the ordinary...a few calm songs and a few love songs and some could'nt really "go with the flow" of what was going on.
As for the writing I found some of the dialogues to be sometimes uncomfortable and innapropriate, and some repetitive things that don't add nothing to the story, actually found Myron to be more interesting than either one of the main characters. Sure it get a few tears out of you, even more if you're more sensitive or can relate to this, but still what makes it sad is more the subject then how it is represented.
With all things in a "mediocre" level i couldnt give it more or less than a mediocre rate.
PS:Found really cute and original the way Abbie "claimed" Sam, but did not check the veracity of this.
I read the 2 critical reviews of this that I could find that seemed to have any teeth. I sought them out because as I was watching I started to develop a negative feeling. I didn't think to myself, "My god, this is so terrible. I feel so bad for this girl. I remember how rough high school was. I can't begin to put words to how real this is" as the prevailing narrative seems to suggest. I started to feel like a knee-jerking Republican who wanted to role his eyes and scream ,"Personal responsibility! Stop blaming everyone!" Then the intelligent liberal side of me wanted to ask questions of why this almost felt like it was romanticizing suicide and, perhaps dangerously and naively giving every child with impulse control issues a perfect narrative to justify their own by couching their decision in the horribleness of everyone around them.
As purely something to watch, it's one of the most redundant things I've sat through without speeding up the playback. The same fights, the same questions, the same, "I can't I can't I can't. You have to you have to you have to." I understand most of the actors to be relative newbies, but they seem to have been primarily cast to moonlight as a community college's campaign to show how inclusive they are on the brochure. It's not like out and out "bad" acting, as much as it's watching 20+ year old beautiful people pretend to embody the kind of angst and drama you might find in "Kids" or "American Honey." Alongside them is the most oblivious group of parents and teachers a rich society with everything to lose could ask for. I wasn't sympathetic, but you can decide whether it's my white male status trying to condescend, or my voracious appetite for story-telling that was moved to say so.
The story reads like an adult who compiled a bunch of modern teenagers tales about high school and then tried to weave a narrative as though it was personally experienced. There's an emphasis on asking whether the main girl was bullied, a hot button issue frequently disproved as the most significant indicator predicating self-harm. One should seek to describe particularly "toxic" environments, sure, but each piece of her breakdown has crimes that are eerily equated to the most horrendous actors. Publishing her poem anonymously as egregious as rape? What if it gets out! Let's convene a round-table and figure out how to cover our asses. It's hard to ratchet up sympathy for her or the accused when you frame her reasons like a soup of disappointment where we all should be ashamed, no matter how small our part.
I mostly don't like when serious issues that mean serious things to a lot of people get popular simply because of their subject matter and not because the subject is handled with any tact or appreciation for what's been learned about it. Beautiful people prescribing the dialogue for justifying the social space to be shared and protected for rapists doesn't do anyone any favors. Elegant streams of blood in a white dress strew about the floor or bathtub make the act look almost sacred. Depicting everyone as self-involved failures who can't understand or can't respond proactively until after the fact serves to delegitimize the efforts made to better understand and treat those who suffer from the myriad reasons that might provoke suicide. You could copy and paste this girl's experience into the lives of hundreds of thousands of people who made it through similar circumstances, but you won't find any of them here.
Any given moment you can have hundreds, maybe thousands of reasons to die. Most then move on to the hundreds plus 1 to keep going. Many who find themselves contemplating suicide span a whole host of reasons that speak to maladies more out of their control than image management. Most don't want to make a kind of perverse game or mystery out of mitigating justice or exposing the truth. This mostly just feels dishonest. It's like it wants to appeal to the most selfish instinct that reroutes everything we should be saying or doing to change and put it at the feet of our sick sad world. There are characters who at various points try to speak to this sentiment, but always in a, "he said she said" reduction that doesn't explore any real degree of truth or how it unfolds. Someone who never found answers champions quitting looking for them.
https://www.fatherly.com/health-science/psychology/netflix-13-reasons-why-suicidal-thoughts/
I'm a bit sad the show is over but I'm not that glad about this series finale.
1- If the plan was to kill Stefan just so he could be the hero of the day, there were other ways.. That whole Redemption thing.. I'm kinda surprised it didn't say on his grave that "He died as a Martyr, like he has ALWAYS wanted".
2- To me the whole Caroline/Stefan pairing has been made just because they were both lonely when Elena chose Damon. At the end of season 4, the plan was for her to live her life with Klaus, not go and marry Stefan. (Klaus: "He's your 1st love, I'm your forever")
Plus this ending kinda made it look like as if Kathetine got what she wanted in the end (Stefan 'choosing ' her).
3- Bonnie is a freaking witch. She saved the town but couldn't save Stefan...?
Also, neither the other side or hell still exist so why all those dead people kept coming back at the end.
And yeah. Jeremy... Not cool! We haven't seen him in a ages and nothing. No reunion, nothing on his life.. Not cool.
4- The past 3 episodes didn't make any sense tbh and we're a bit disrespectful. I mean come on, we've watched 8 seasons of this show!!!!
